#231: Ghost Talker's Daydream (2004)

 

Studio: Hal Film Maker

Director: Osamu Sekita

Screenplay: Katsumasa Kanazawa and Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on the manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro

Voice Cast: Masumi Asano as Misaki Saiki; Tomokazu Sugita as Souichiro Kadotake; Yukari Tamura as Ai Kunugi; Daisuke Kishio as Mitsuru Fujiwara

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

This anime adaptation had always been one of interest for me because I was a fan of the source manga. Found discounted in a British bookstore, the source manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro, whose work was adapted into Twilight of the Dark Master (1997), an obscure Akiyuki Shinbo helmed horror OVA. It is also lurid, about an albino dominatrix named Saiki Misaki who, in-between her sex worker career which also includes writing for a porno magazine, is using her ability to see and communicate with ghosts to help a branch of the local government exorcise buildings and environments. The source manga is violent, sexually explicit and sleazy, and tackles subjects like sexual violence. It was also however a work which looked exceptional, with the illustrations by Meguro, and had managed to be the right side of lurid by being smarter, building a world whose images could be ghoulish as much as it played to sex comedy. Sadly, published by Dark Horse, they only got to volume six before the series was cancelled for English language release, never continued up past through the remaining four volumes, and managing to end on the worse cliff-hanger as well to emphasis this fact involving a haunted apartment complex.

It will not defend its lurid content and neither makes a good case for the manga to people, as ten minutes in it depicts a near rape, involving a younger sister of a murdered woman and her male murderer, only for the lead Saiki, in S&G gear which she uses in her exorcism work for ease, to barge in and deal with this. Neither will some appreciate the blending of light comedy (including sex comedy) against the grim subject matter, as the first episode, introducing that high school girl character Kunugi Ai, a main character for the source, also deals with the murder of her older sister and the death of her infant daughter in the same incident, their ghosts haunting the world as much due to a plush bear with audio recording technology within it has compromising material recorded onto it. The premise, in spite of its lurid content and seen in glimpses here through all four episodes, is a good one in terms of how, whilst her career choice was a salacious one, Saiki Misaki's career choice is a day job which is frustrating and a chore. Some of the best moments here in the adaptation deal with how all her jobs, never touching on her writing career, are a grind, with exorcists like her quietly hired by the Japanese government, or a local government branch in the city, to deal with hauntings of public buildings and apartments as contract work, which is a fascinating premise to have just in envisioning this like a public service sector role. Even that the third and fourth episodes include a female sceptic, a cop in a certain case Saiki accidentally gets involved with, is contrasted in that this a job which is not spectacular even if the risks are dangerous.

The only unnatural aspect, never really elaborated on in the anime, is that she has a demonic rope, living, which co-exists around her body if pushed, but it feels neglected in this adaptation. Everything else in contrast is the banal struggles of being a working dominatrix or having to put up with annoying promotional work for her company like giving used underwear as a prize. It is lurid, but this banality is playfully absurd. This anime adaption, despite coming midway into the manga's run, feels like a slither of it which is also a handicap, especially as the four episodes are usual television episode lengths of under thirty minutes, which means none of the wider plot the manga was building up between episodic tales is seen, only two episodic tales and a final one taking two episodes. The anime is an adult work as its source, with explicit nudity and lot of sex comedy in-between the more macabre content, which was as much the reason this was released. Aspects from the source material are dumb and weird if anyone was to view this, like the running joke about pubic hair which is a source (or source lack of) of embarrassment for Saiki, and in the source manga there was the fact, though one which could be a compelling piece of drama, in that she is a virgin yet managed in this career alongside exorcisms. 

Like the source material never being fully released, it is a shame as inherently the show has an advantage for an episodic horror work of having a strong set of leads. Saiki herself, in spite of all mentioned, and that the manga and the anime are thirsty for her physically, is a great lead character to work with as, gimmicks aside, it is a young working woman who complains and is frank about this, stuck in a regular job which she is good at but sucks at times, or that she technically has a stalker, high school student Fujiwara Mitsuru, whose gag as a stalker may be far more tasteless nowadays, but comes off as a mere annoyance to her, one who is actually helpful in many times just in this adaptation, as well as coming off more as a frenemy for her especially in the manga. Kadotake Souichirou, the person connected to the exorcism business, is a great male lead - a scaredy-cat when it comes to ghosts, a meek and clumsy bespectacled employee and driver, but a killer in martial arts - and Kunugi Ai, when she comes in, is an idiosyncratic side character, developing her own ability to see ghosts and an eccentricity, as she carries a giant plush teddy bear with her everywhere called Popo. In the manga you had time to built this motley bunch and, one of the huge virtues of the manga was that, alongside these characters, it managed to avoid becoming offensive with some of its more lurid content and, when it wanted to be macabre and transgressive, it had the huge advantage of its illustrator Sankichi Meguro pulling the sequences off on paper perfectly.

The obvious issue is that, alongside being merely a slither of the premise, more a work to sell the source material, this is also an OVA in the post hand drawn era when the format was losing favour, so one of the hugest virtues for Saki Okuse's source manga, Sankichi Meguro, is lost as this has a very flat look.  Hal Film Maker, the studio behind this, managed some good work at this time in spite of this transitionary period - Princess Tutu (2002-3), so different to this as a sweet ballet fantasy TV series, had a distinct art style even if working around its budget, and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005), despite its stereotypical "anime" style, is not known for this, both for how gleefully perverse its premise is but also how visually the jokes, including an angel girl whose bludgeoning club does obliterate the male lead's cranium to mush as much as resurrects him, took advantage of its bright cute colours and style. Ghost Talker's Daydream does not have a memorable style, and a distinct thing for Sankichi Meguro's artwork in the manga was that black, not only in terms of a lot of night time scenes but even black outlines and detail regardless of the time a moment takes place in, is one of the first things I think of for the manga, whilst this has a brighter washed out look. Alongside that, tonal changes between the serious and humorous, and all the kinkiness, within the manga has a more concise tonal balance even if it is that manga, as pages to read, can pace itself differently and nothing else.

This is definitely the case that, for episodes three and four, this is dealing with a series of child disappearances which were clearly eventual murders, with the added complication that the person behind the crimes was a woman who was raped by her uncle, the anime carefully dancing around this even though it could be argued as purely exploitative. This is where I still hold the manga, again, having managed a daft hand, or the right tonal mood in its rich aesthetic and tone, around this, even if this is entirely of a personal opinion and can alter as I return to the source over and over This shows, like a lot of anime, that the blurring between comedy and extreme content is more common than you think, but this has the additional issue that, looking very light in colour and style, not heavy in aesthetic stylisation, the anime adaptation loses an advantage to its arsenal in being able to stand out and even get this balance between these two drastically different sides right.

It had virtues, and if biases from the admiration of the manga's virtues are here also, I will not deny that this is more a curiosity. As someone who wished as many titles were preserved, I would always be biased to have even an obscure title like this still be available, even if contrary to my initial beliefs, this did manage to get a Western release as there is an English language soundtrack. It unfortunately was a Geneon release, Geneon USA a side division of the Japanese Geneon group which, starting in 1993, closed in 2007, a DVD distributor that was entirely in the United States and, for many titles which were licensed rescued later also saw others, like Ghost Talker's Daydream, trapped in the afterlife never being recovered from it. The manga especially, whilst with content that might be difficult to defend, feels a greater tragedy just from never getting finished, falling into obscurity, to be found in cheap discounted copies on sale in bookstores and online as I stumbled onto the work. Manga especially has so many titles which never get finished for their English publications over the decades, which is miserable for anyone who was following them and collecting the volumes, a painful remainder of the business side of this art form.